So just what is it that we did?
During the course of the winter semester of the 1995-96 school year one of the projects of Dr. Avigail Oren's class in the study of the educational uses of electronic communications media in education was the building of a small MOO. The class of about 20 participants, most of them Masters students in educational technology, chose to try and build the MOO around various aspects of Jerusalem, its history and and the cultures that comprise it, trying to emphasize the significance that Jerusalem plays for many different peoples.
The MOO can be found via the GrassRoots Project of St. Johns University. The web page will give you some background information on the entire project. You can connect to the MOO from the web site, or directly from here, or by connecting to: telnet rdz.stjohns.edu 8888 . After logging on as a guest and going through the tutorial, you can connect to our particular niche by continuing to TapRoot, and from there to GRU (GrassRoots University), from there to Tel (Tel Aviv University) and from there to welcome (Jerusalem). Our small corner of this already small corner starts at the house.
The class divided into a number of groups, each of which chose to concentrate on a different aspect of Jerusalem. The final product resembles a sort of treasure hunt in which visitors wander around the prepared environment picking up hints that lead them toward identifying a significant personage related to Jerusalem's long and varied history. Along the way, of course, the visitors hopefully cull a good deal of other useful information which can be classified as learning.
One of the major problems we encountered as we built this MOO was the distinction between our own learning experience and the projected learning experience of students whom we expect would visit the MOO. Most of the written material on the educational aspects of MUDding revolves around the learning experience of the programmer (who usually isn't an experienced programmer). As we define objects in the MOO environment we learn about the environment that we've built -- its possibilities and its limitations -- and we define the social parameters of that environment. On the other hand, this whole aspect isn't part of the experience of the visitor who may actively seek information within the environment, but who is passive in regard to its development.
In previous pages we've already alluded to the advantages and the disadvantages of text-based virtual reality. In a MOO such as the one we tried to develop around Jerusalem, being text-based seems to be more of a disadvantage. The language isn't colorful enough to really attract and involve the visitor, and the "treasure hunt" aspects of the adventure seem as though they might be better realized outside of a computer-based environment. It's hard to tell just who would be attracted to an environment such as this other than academics who are devoted to developing other similar MOOs. We certainly want to be optimistic, but we're not sure that such optimism is really justified.
We're still beginners in this realm, and we're still checking out the territory and its possibilities ourselves, but we hope that this MOO holds some interest - not only for its builders, but for its visitors as well. Feel free to contact any of us with reactions.